There is a lot more to it than that. There had already been a machine recount in Florida, and Bush won that one as well. What Gore did was use a loophole in Florida law to pursue a dubious recount strategy. He demanded hand recounts only in four counties he had won by large margins. That tilted the recount in his favor: hand recounts will find more discernible votes than machine counting, and by only requesting recounts in counties that where the base rate of Gore votes was very high, most of those newly-counted votes would be for Gore. Even WaPo called out this strategy as obviously unfair:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2000/11/18/o...> But there's a danger to Mr. Gore's eventual legitimacy too, if this extraordinary story eventually results in his election. The recounts will now go forward in three counties--Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade. That at least was the situation as of last night. All three of those jurisdictions are heavily Democratic and voted heavily for Mr. Gore; the recount is thus tilted in his favor.
Gore’s tactics got very ugly including objecting to counting military ballots: https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents...
> The Gore campaign, however, viewed the absentee mili- tary ballots received between Election Day and November 17 as a lethal threat. Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican candi- date, who had lost Florida, nonetheless had received a hefty majority of the military absentee vote. Bush would likely top 60 percent at a time when he already enjoyed a 300-vote margin, which Gore was seeking to erase with selective recounts.